Chinese Green Tea: A Guide to the Main Styles
Green tea is the most produced tea category in China, and also the most misunderstood outside of it. In the West it tends to get collapsed into a single idea—light, vegetal, faintly grassy—usually ...
In 1972, Chairman Mao gave President Nixon a small jar of tea as a state gift. Nixon was reportedly puzzled—China was the world’s largest tea producer, and the gift seemed modest. Premier Zhou Enla...
Yunnan black tea goes by a few names. In Chinese it’s Dianhong—“Dian” being an old abbreviated name for Yunnan Province, “hong” meaning red, as in hong cha, red tea. Which is what the Chinese call...
Pu’er is the tea that makes people do a double take. Not because it’s difficult—it isn’t—but because it doesn’t taste like any other tea. Dark and earthy, with a depth that sits closer to aged wine...
Chinese Black Tea vs. Indian Black Tea: What’s the Difference?
When most people in the West think of black tea, they’re thinking of Indian black tea—Assam, Darjeeling, the kind that goes into English Breakfast and every tea bag they’ve ever dunked. Strong, som...
How to Store Loose Leaf Tea (And Why It Matters)
Tea doesn’t go bad the way food does. Stale tea won’t make you sick. What it will do is taste flat, lose its aroma, and gradually stop being the thing you bought. The enemy is oxidation—the same pr...
What Is Wuyuan Tea? Twelve Centuries from China’s Most Documented Tea County
There are famous tea counties in China, and then there is Wuyuan. Most origins have some history. Wuyuan has twelve centuries of documented history, including a named mention in Lu Yu’s Classic of ...
What Is Oolong Tea? The Category That Contains Multitudes
Oolong is the category that confuses people most, and it’s not hard to see why. Ask ten tea drinkers to describe oolong and you’ll get ten different answers—because they’ve probably tried ten genui...
Jasmine Tea: Beijing’s Default, China’s Most Scented Cup
When Mike lived in Beijing, his regular tea seller had one standing assumption: if you walked in without specifying otherwise, you were there for jasmine. Grade was a question. Quantity was a quest...
What Is White Tea? The Least Processed Tea in the Collection
White tea is sometimes described as “unprocessed,” which isn’t quite right but points at something true. Compared to green tea, which is fixed with heat almost immediately after picking, white tea ...
How to Make Iced Tea with Loose Leaf Tea
Loose leaf makes better iced tea than bags. That’s not a close call. The leaves have room to open, the extraction is cleaner, and you’re not fighting the papery, compressed character of a teabag th...
What Was the Tea Horse Road? History of China's Ancient Chamadao
The Tea Horse Road: How Tea Conquered the Roof of the World There's a cobblestone path in western Sichuan, buried now under bamboo and moss, that once carried more commercial weight than any road...